To the far right of the far left

One of my pet peeves is the mainstream media using the label “far-right” not as any sort of an accurate description but as a dog-whistle to their progressive audiences. Just like other terms like “racist” or “bigot”, so promiscuously used, “far right” is designed as a moral and intellectual shortcut to judging a person or a group as beyond pale of respectability and reasonable debate. It’s guilt by designation.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more prominent than in the concerted campaign by the Western media to label the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as far-right. Thus, the latest from “The New York Times”:

In fact, the AfD is described as “far-right” four times in the first few paragraphs of the story, just so you, dear Old Grey Lady reader, get the message. In particular: “The AfD shocked Germany in the fall [of 2017] when it became the first far-right party to enter Parliament since World War II.” Germany, war, far-right – this sentence has got everything to help you make the almost inevitable association between the Alternative and the Nazis. And as to the theme of the story itself – well, you know who else in modern history courted German workers? I’ll give you a hint: the National [mumble] German Workers Party. Yep, those guys.

How far right is the AfD? The party started as an Eurosceptic exercise by those Germans who were getting tired of their tax money going to bail out the rest of Europe from the consequences of their reckless financial management and bad governance. As such, the AfD continues to be that rarity in the continental European politics – a pro-free market party that believes in small government and lower taxes; all more Anglo-Saxon (as the Anglo-Saxon used to be, at least) than Teutonic. That the Alternative has also become a lightning rod for the public dissatisfaction with immigration and multicultural policies was in a way inevitable for a protest party against the establishment, where the establishment, from the Christian Democrats on the centre-right through all the parties of centre-left and far-left, supports open borders and unlimited immigration. If desiring sensible and orderly immigration, and putting assimilation ahead of multiculturalism make you far-right, then parties like the Republicans, the Tories, and the Liberals in Australia have largely been far-right for most of their modern history. Which I guess is exactly what people who read the New York Times believe already.

The Alternative’s policy document is extensive and also available in English, for those who want to discover for themselves what the party that mainstream journalists insinuate is but one goose-step away from the Sieg Heil actually believes in. It’s an interesting reading, and I recommend you sample it – but here’s a selection of a few particularly Nazi-like policies that the AfD advocate:

Government should serve its citizens, and not vice versa. Therefore, only lean government is good government. Government should merely provide a framework within which its citizens can thrive. A constant and often ideology-driven expansion of government functions has reached financial and practical limitations, and is a threat to the fundamental rights of freedom of its citizens. Government has taken on too many tasks. There is a need to focus on four classic functions performed by government: domestic and foreign security, justice, foreign relations, and financial administration.

Whilst tax evasion of relatively insignificant amounts is prosecuted in Germany, the wastage of tax revenues – which is equally detrimental to public welfare – is not punished at all. Shocking construction cost overruns, nonsensical purchases, and lavish prestige projects initiated by public officials and agency heads go largely unpun-ished as a result of current legislation. The AfD wishes to introduce a new criminal offence on budget fraud.

We oppose the idea to transform the European Union into a centralised federal state. We are in favour of returning the European Union to an economic union based on shared interests, and consisting of sovereign, but loosely connected nation states.

Free market competition produces the best economic results. The unsubsidised supply of goods and services, which is most beneficial to buyers and sellers alike, is always set to win the day. Therefore, the AfD contends that the stronger the competition, and the lower the ratio of government expenditures to gross national product (state spending ratio), the better it is for everyone.

Any successful energy policy must have three aims. Power supply must be guaranteed, affordable and environmentally compatible. This triad was always adhered to in the German power supply, but is abandoned by the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG). The EEG and the transition to renewable energy jeopardise power supply. They raise energy prices, due to technical factors, while wind turbines present eyesores in cultural landscapes and pose an often fatal risk to birds.

The NYT article itself unintentionally alludes to the absurdity of the both the misapplied ideological labels as well as the actual current politics themselves that the labels are meant to reflect:

The AfD’s “pro-worker” platform (“pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration,” as Mr. Reil puts it) resonates in Bottrop as well as on the factory floors of Germany’s iconic carmakers in the former east and the wealthy south of the country.

I’m old enough to remember when a “pro-worker” platform would have implied if not the nationalisation of industry, then at least union-friendly corporatism, generous (with someone else’s money) social spending, and robust support for manufacturing. Now, the “far-right” AfD’s “pro-worker” platform is “pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration”, because the parties of the left are less interested in jobs, industry and growth than they are in renewable energy and multiculturalism. The working people have not left the social democratic parties, the social democratic parties have left the working people. When the German Social Democrats have switched from being a part of the working class to a party of the wokeing class, it’s little wonder that movements like the Alternative for Germany are attracting support from people whose real, mundane, bread and butter interests have been deprioritised in favour of pursuing moral vanities and symbolism by the tertiary indoctrinated trendy inner city political and intellectual elites.

As I wrote a few months ago, “If this is ‘far-right’, I’m a 100% Nazi. The only Polish Nazi in history.”